Outrage

Clément Duval, Michael Shreve

Description

“Theft exists only through the exploitation of man by man…when Society refuses you the right to exist, you must take it…the policeman arrested me in the name of the Law, I struck him in the name of Liberty.”

In 1887, Clément Duval joined the tens of thousands of convicts sent to the “dry guillotine” of the French penal colonies. Few survived and fewer were able to tell the stories of their life in that hell. Duval spent fourteen years doing hard labor—espousing the values of anarchism and demonstrating the ideals by being a living example the entire time—before making his daring escape and arriving in New York City, welcomed by the Italian and French anarchists there.

This is much more than an historical document about the anarchist movement and the penal colony. It is a remarkable story of survival by one man’s self-determination, energy, courage, loyalty, and hope. It was thanks to being true and faithful to his ideals that Duval survived life in this hell. Unlike the well-known prisoner Papillon, who arrived and dramatically escaped soon after Duval, he encouraged his fellow prisoners to practice mutual aid, through their deeds and not just their words. It is a call to action for mindful, conscious people to fight for their rights to the very end, to never give up or give in.

More than just a story of a life or a testament of ideals, here is a monument to the human spirit and a war cry for freedom and justice.

Sujets

• Papillon
• Illegalism
• Mutual aid
• Lepidoptera
• Jailbreak
• Luigi Galleani

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 24 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781604867671
• Langue: English

Extrait

Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony
Michael Shreve © 2012
This edition © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-500-4 LCCN: 2011939693
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover by John Yates
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
This book has been made possible in part by a generous donation from the Anarchist Archives Project.
Printed on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
Introduction to the English Edition
Chapter 1 I Rebelled Because It Was My Right
Chapter 2 The Healthiest Penitentiary in Guiana
Chapter 3 You Can Have My Fat, But Not My Skin
Chapter 4 To Shake a Friendly Hand
Chapter 5 The Guillotine’s Blade
Chapter 6 A Most Unusual Stash
Chapter 7 Spreading the Good Word
Chapter 8 David and Ballin
Chapter 9 When You Speak to Me Like That
Chapter 10 The Anarchist Plate
Chapter 11 The Saint Joseph’s Massacre
Chapter 12 Never Go to the Penal Colony
Biographies
Bibliography
Introduction to the English Edition
T he last Frenchmen who had been sentenced to the penal colony in Guiana were not repatriated until 1954, a century after the Second Empire had adopted the "Loi sur l’exécution de la peine des travaux forcés" (Law on the execution of the sentence of hard labor). Starting in 1852 more than seventy thousand men were sent to Guiana: at least three fourths died there; barely five thousand made it back to France freed; nine thousand escaped there were very few survivors.
Clément Duval was one of them. Condemned in 1887 to hard labor for life, he managed to leave "l’enfer vert" (the green hell) after fourteen years and eighteen escape attempts. In his Memoir he tells about this hope that was stronger than everything he had to put up with: hunger, sickness, the constant humiliations inflicted on the convicts.
Duval was not a hero, nor was he a victim of a miscarriage of justice: he was an anarchist who admitted his crimes breaking and entering, burglary, wounding a police officer and bore his sentence. But he continuously protested against the abuses, arbitrary punishments, guards’ contempt, snitching, cheating, and blatant injustices against the weakest or most rebellious.
Many anarchists ended up in the penal colonies after the "lois scélérates " (villainous laws) of 1892 allowed convictions for crimes of opinion or inciting violence. In France, from 1892 to 1894, Ravachol, Vaillant, Émile Henry, and Caserio paid for their crimes with their heads. Accomplices, a few imitators, and comrades with ideas judged to be "particularly dangerous" were sent to Guiana. They had put up posters or insulted a police officer, they sang subversive songs or bragged about living without working … The English sent boys suspected of stealing a handkerchief to mysterious Australia.
Off the shores of Cayenne, the administrative center of Guiana and a name emblematic of the penal colony, were the Salvation Islands: Devil’s Island, reserved for those convicted of high treason like Captain Dreyfus, Saint Joseph Island and Royal Island for the "troublemakers" the recidivists, repeat offenders. The penal colony was not a mere matter of breaking rocks in a faraway land. It was a system that was highly refined in brutality, in wasting lives and money, in the maniacal control over the lives of convicts so that every minute was a punishment. They called it "the dry guillotine."
The system quickly destroyed whoever was caught up in its gears, whether they were convicts or bureaucrats. Betrayal and shady deals dominated both sides. The hierarchical chain held the men as tightly as the shackles it rotted their flesh and spirit. The promotion of convicts to the rank of foreman (contremaître) reinforced it: the foremen had to be the biggest toughs, the biggest snitches, and the biggest bootlickers because at the least offense they would be sent back among the crowd of convicts where their hopes of survival were slim.
See, when you’re caught, it’s forever. Someone sentenced to eight years or more of hard labor had to "double" it, that is, stay in the colony for the same amount of time. He rarely survived, let alone earned enough money to finance a trip back to France. Most of the convicts (just like today) were young men. Some would live twenty, thirty, even fifty years dressed in shabby clothes, eating rancid bacon and rotten vegetables crippled, sick, and powerless. A life of answering "present" twice a day at roll call, screaming your name and number at every passing of the guard, suffering the insults and humiliations in silence, stashing away whatever might bear witness to another life: a photograph, a letter … with time in the hole for a trifle or a murder, for a bag of tobacco or a failed escape.
Clément Duval resisted. Born in 1850, he was older than most of his comrades. He was in the war of 1870 and had already known a hard life. But above all he was an anarchist and proud of it. A locksmith by trade, he refused to make handcuffs or sharpen the guillotine. When the director threatened to make him bend to his will, he answered "that mindful men, such as I considered myself, were like glass they might break, but they never bend."
When the big convoys of anarchists started arriving in Cayenne in 1892, Duval had already been there for five years. He had earned the respect of a few guards and the express animosity of others. He knew the possibilities of "making stuff" to earn a few extra sous or a little trust. He was aware of the risks of ill-prepared escape attempts. He knew who were the "stubborn mules" to watch out for. A dozen anarchists sentenced between 1892 and 1894 died from sickness or in revolt the same year they got there; a dozen died while trying to escape, or when too old to escape; four went back to France. Only two bore witness, Clément Duval and Auguste Liard-Courtois. If it weren’t for the publication of their memoirs, most of the others would have remained anonymous. (Short biographies are included in this book.)

Duval’s Memoir began appearing in 1907 in the Italian anarchist weekly Cronaca Sovversiva in New York. Duval arrived in New York in 1903 and was taken care of by the Italian anarchist comrades, a large, united colony. Luigi Galleani, who had personally known the penal colony in the Italian islands, welcomed him in his home and started working on a translation of his manuscript really, an interpretation: he did not hesitate to rewrite entire dialogues and descriptions in order to enhance the text and create a thousand-page tome that was published in 1929 by the Biblioteca dell’Adunata dei Refrattari.
Luigi Galleani died in 1931 in Italy, Clément Duval in 1935 in Brooklyn at the age of eighty-five. The children of the Italian anarchists gradually integrated into American society and L’Adunata dei refrattari, one of their principal newspapers, shut down in 1971. The last editor, Max Sartin, was the one who left me Clément Duval’s manuscript in 1980.
Max was a worthy heir of the illegalists. He lived under a false name, had his mail sent to neighbors (who offered me a plate of homemade tortellini and California wine as good as any Italian wine) and it was not until our second meeting that he let me in his house in Brooklyn to give me a glimpse of his archives. And, in the end, to give me a thick envelope marked "CD."
His companion Fiorina and he led me to the subway with strong advice, and I did not dare open the envelope before being in a safe place. There were more than four hundred pages of manuscript there and a large photo of Duval. I did not know at the time that he had spent his final years with them. But I did know that since Galleani, no one had looked at those pages and no extract had been published in French.
In the following years I transcribed the manuscript and verified (unfortunately) that the missing pages were definitely lost. I spent time in the archives of the penal colony in Aix-en-Provence, in a dusty attic where huge registers contained what remains of prisoners’ lives: administrative reports, lists of sentences and escape attempts, seized letters … I was able to fish out a few names that Duval only knew by ear (he wrote Kervaux for Thiervoz, Paridaine for Paridaën), tie in a few facts, and dig up a little supplementary information. Then I read everything published about the penal colony (the books have multiplied since then), even the so-called Memoirs of Papillon, the anti-Duval par excellence: not only was most of his book made up, but he constantly bragged about being friendly with the prison administration, he denounced his comrades, he saved a guard’s little girl, he complacently surrendered to the most humiliating and degrading jobs … His fantastic escape attempts were often borrowed from legend; he showed no solidarity with the other prisoners and no political conscience, the exact opposite of Duval, or Alexandre Jacob, or Jacob Law.

The text published here represents the bulk of the manuscript. The punctuation has been standardized, the spelling regularized, and the chapters organized, but otherwise it is unchanged (translator’s notes are enclosed in brackets). The French publisher found the original too long and it was necessary to sacrifice several of the repetitive passages. It is not essential in reading to feel the same pestering boredom, day after day, year after year, and